Infinite Sith Empire
That Sith civilisation begun over one hundred thousand years before the Battle of Yavin was a given, though known only to a few - it was information sequestered in the depths of the so-called Dark Holocron, and it took a millennium for a Jedi Master, arguably the first Jedi Grandmaster, to wrestle this simple fact from the maze of lies therein. Old logic, based on erroneous knowledge of history, was that the Sith Empire was founded from the First Great Schism. This was not the case, and that much is apparent from all with a passing knowledge of Sith history. This threw into the air a great many Sith references that pre-dated the foundation of the Ancient Sith Empire by Ajunta Pall, Darth Andeddu, Tulak Hord, Xoxaan, Remulus Deypa and Sorzus Syn. Similarly, the details of which worlds that Adas and his Empire discovered with their Force based hyperdrives beyond the reaches of the Stygian Caldera, throws more such worlds into stark contrast - those being known by Adas being Arbra, Malachor, Arkania and Tund - and those not. Then there is the fact that, in 100,000 BBY, the Celestials created their constructs. Centerpoint, the Maw, the Kathol Rift, the Transistory Mists, the Cron Cluster, the Cosmic Turbine, the Valtaullu Rift, the Stygian Caldera, and a long list of other impossible events. These worlds paint a picture, of an Empire which spanned the galaxy, which ruled before the Celestials descended and crushed them. So too do the species, and the Sith spirits who can only be connected to them. Rise To understand the seminal efforts of the first Sith principality, that prehistoric domain known to legend as the Infinite Empire, one must first understand the loathsome entities of deific power that forged and ruled that realm. The origins of the Dark Pantheon lie, of course, in the Sith people, who evolved from a charcoal-skinned species of arboreal simians on the lush world of Korriban and, by 130,000 years Before the Battle of Yavin, had established a primitive, tribal civilisation rich with Forceful arcana. Through malfeasant rite and the unabating consumption of life energy did the greatest of primordial Sith sorcerers achieve twisted apotheosis, shedding mortality to become apocalyptic deities eternally hungering for destruction. Yet whence did their mastery of the dark side, honed and systematised into the "Sith magic" that allowed such ascension, come? Much like the spirit ichor channelled by Dathomirian witches, made possible by the weakened fabric of reality that allegedly allowed communion with the Celestials' power, so might Sith wizardry, at least in those ancient days, be understood to be not necessarily a more pure or true expression of the dark side as Ood Bnar conceived, but rather a channelling of the spectral essence of the first and greatest of the immortal gods of the Sith. Darth Nemesis First revered as the Sith'ari Typhojem, the Left-Handed God, and later known to the Rakata, and to history, as the Darth Nemesis, the Overlord of the Dark Pantheon predated the establishment of a technological civilisation on Korriban. It is believed that Typhojem was of an altogether greater order of being than the likes of Bilious Torment, Sakkra-kla or even Abeloth. While theologians of Attahox had identified Typhojem as a fallen Celestial, presumed more ancient than even the Sith species, this interpretation is likely a result of a misunderstanding of the term Celestial. Instead, fragmentary transcriptions of the Taurannik Codex suggest Typhojem arose from the dark side of the Force itself as an incarnation of pure destruction and entropy. Perhaps much like Sel-Makor, born of the bloodshed between Voss and Gormak millennia later, this ruinous power coalesced into being out of the miasma of dark side energy unwittingly fashioned through countless centuries of barbaric warfare between disparate Sith tribes. As Ood Bnar gleaned from the Dark Holocron, the Sith simultaneously empowered and drew strength from this dark will, which divested much of its native power to nourish the Sith's recondite knowledge. The result was Korriban wilting away to a dark husk of reddish sands, honeycombed with temples dedicated to the first aggrandised mortals that founded the cacodaemoniacal collective of the Pantheon, and the tombs of those sorcerers who failed in their efforts to realise such divine might. Spreading from their homeworld as a scourge, the Sith subjugated many worlds and races, reaching their first apex with an Empire that dominated the galaxy by 100,000 BBY - the first instance of the Infinite Empire. Relying on sleeper ships and their own brand of hypergate technology, devices born of the prodigious intellect of the fledgling Sith pantheon, the Infinite Empire grew slowly to eclipse all lesser spacefaring civilisations. At this time occurred the first instance of significant phenotypic change due to natural genetic drift, alchemical modification and interbreeding with other species, with increasingly lighter, crimson tones prevailing among Sith who remained on Korriban, and native tridactylism giving way to four or five digits in select populations (such as the Sek and Rath clans). Accompanying this evolution was the broadening in definition of 'Sith' to apply to those who adhered to the race's ideology and bizarrely selfless devotion to evil rather than the species alone. Among these were Zhell and Taung; the former had adopted Sith culture upon the Infinite Empire ensnaring Coruscant, and triumphed against their ancient Taung enemies only through the osmosis of dark teachings through the Battalions. Yet the Sith had repurposed the Taung as vassals also, dominating two peoples through the manipulation of a single war's outcome, bringing the newfound Warriors of Shadow to their conquest of Roon. Yet most powerful and steadfast of the Sith's servitor races were the Columi and Sharu, whose corruption magnified their pride and gave rise to the shared tradition of pyramid building. Looking Elsewhere The Infinite Sith Empire had reached the point whereby it was turning the galaxy it wanted into a playground. This was, inevitably, deeply boring for these deities, and they set upon the conquest of other galaxies. This saw the Infinite Sith encounter a ripple of discontent within their pantheon; who should lead such an endeavour? And, how could such a thing be managed? While it would be relatively painless to invade the satellite galaxies, that was not the challenge the Infinite Sith sought; they wanted more beyond their stellar halo. But the essential issue of Sith cooperation was unavoidable - no one Sith invasion force would retain cohesion and would be a weakened and spent force before they reached the frontier of another galaxy. This did not stop them attacking the problem with atypical Sith ingenuity; and a solution was found. Turning to their almost limitless resources, they forged a force of automatons, that could be easily programmed (or, through the method of sprit transferrence, enteched) to ensure that they would not decimate their own numbers, but sufficiently chaotic to lay the foundations before a smaller elite group of Sith could head to the galaxy to oversee the reorganisation of the galaxy. These destructive and incredible machines were known as the Abominor and the invasion was launched with much fanfare. For such an incredible endeavour, a feat not repeated for nearly another hundred thousand years - an intergalactic invasion - it fell on dead ears with what followed. Abeloth Born on the planet Vitae, Abeloth - her birth name having been long forgotten by the annals of history - was an Infinite Sith that was different; she believed in higher powers than even the deities she worshipped. Recognising that, by and large, the Infinite Sith had started as mere mortals and broken beyond that coil, she believed fervently that reality had been shaped before they crawled out of the primordial ooze, and as such it was whomever had done such a thing were the true deities. Considering the Infinite Sith nothing more than false deities, she nonetheless recognised their path as a route to Ascension to Goddess and accrued all the powers that she could on by studying the Taurannik Codex and by worshipping at the feet of the Pantheon. But she did not consider herself a Sith, and thought of herself as so much more than the Sith. It was with this singular goal that she pursued her aim of joining the realm of what she had dubbed Celestials, and while the Infinite Sith were congratulating themselves on the launching of the Abominor, she was instead piercing this realm into that of the Ones, appearing in the Courtyard of their home. But Abeloth was not content with simply finding the Celestials; she wanted to become one. And so, when she found a family of three, a father, son and daughter, she ingratiated herself with them as a servant, and, eventually, a mother. But a creature of the mortal realm she remained, and Abeloth continued to age in-spite of the fact that her ascension was such that she should not have - but over time she found both the secret and curse of the Celestials; the former, being that, by bathing in the Pool of Knowledge and drinking from the Font of power, she could ascend even further to the position of Celestial, and become the Mother in name, not just in role. The second was that she fell for the oldest issue of the dark side; attachment. And although her attachment to her adopted children drove her rage, it did not stop them from banishing the Vain Goddess from their realm and then, following her tumbling descent, to the source of this Chaos; the Infinite Sith Empire. The True Gods Descend The first reign of the Infinite Empire was relatively brief. Its efforts to dominate non-Sith life were merely symptomatic of the Dark Pantheon's own efforts to satiate their eternal hunger, and no doubt the galaxy would have been rendered lifeless if it were not for the Celestials' intervention. The Celestials were originally a starfish-shaped species adhering to a philosophy of order and balance between the light and dark sides, and over the course of their development they passed through a stage of entechment into vast machine bodies before many of their number abandoned the physical realm, and their echinodermic forms, to ascend into the Force itself. By 100,000 BBY, the Celestials were vast, numerous and inscrutable powers contending with the Sith for sway over the lesser developed races of the galaxy. After three of their number raised the Centerpoint and Sinkhole Stations and the Maw to imprison Abeloth on Vitae, the Celestials turned their attention to the Sith proper. Millennia of divine warfare, unparalleled in scale, ravaged the galaxy. The Celestial Empire rallied its vassals, the Kwa Holdings, the Gree Enclave, and the servile Killik race of builders, driving the Sith from Coruscant, where malign legacy lingered in the Ice Crypts and a Sith shrine, and seeing the north split between the Kwa and Gree. The Infinite Sith rallied, dispatching forces from Columni to Duro and from Tund to Aargau, but their vassals were repulsed and the Celestials promptly began churning out superweapons and gathering worlds to them, essentially seizing control of humanity, and much of the galaxy, from the Infinite Sith. The Infinite Sith Empire was shattered into nearly two dozen islands, a briar-patch of anomalies stitching across the galaxy as Throneworlds on Rhand, Valtaullu, Gunninga, Muspilli, Prakith, Millinar, Korriban, Tascollan and Roon were ring-fenced by incredible gravitational disturbances. The Celestials directed a single minded effort to locking many of the Infinite Sith's greatest Shadow Lords in a Monolith and then surrounding said monolith in an impossible hyperspace distortion known as the Chiloon Rift. The War Beyond the Empire The Celestial War, however, had the added dimension caused by the launch of the Abominor; another galaxy to fight over. The Celestials, having given form to the Silentium, a machine race dedicated to symmetry and order, dispatched them to follow the vector of the Abominor, to defeat them before they could return as a danger to the Celestials. But the void was not the exclusive provenance of automata. Expecting a more protracted war, and the need to have a mobile asset, the Sith deity known as Yuuzhan'tar anchored his magnificence to a world and, with use of incredible Force powers, moved a planet, complete with the remaining thrall within the Infinite Sith's control, originally native to Janguine, into the Intergalactic Void. The Celestials knew of this, and so, after the Silentium armada was dispatched, promptly made use of their incredible technology to erect a hyperspace barrier around the galaxy to prevent an invasion. And so Yuuzhan'tar turned his prodigious energies to crafting his Sith and human thralls with alchemy and forging biological technology which could undo the gravitic traps that the Celestials could fashion; dovin basils to warp gravity wells; biotech to surpass traditional weapons; plagues to strike against the enemy in a manner which no superweapon could defeat; the perfect tool to counter the Celestial invasion, a humanoid species that, in its long travels, lost track of its mixed roots and descended into primitivism and then, via the genetic manipulations of Yuuzhan'tar, into the species known dozens of millennia later as the Yuuzhan Vong. But, similarly, it was not enough to field one planet, no matter how well equipped, to reconquer a galaxy. And so Yuuzhan'tar chose, isolated from his kin, to retreat to the galaxy that the Abominor would even now be conquering. By the time Yuuzhan'tar arrived, however, the war between the Silentium and Abominor was in full swing; the Abominor had been designed to sow chaos, not dig in for a war, and so were caught flat-footed by the Silentium. Unable to see the need to unveil the true might of the Infinite Sith, Yuuzhan'tar settled in to wait for the conflict to end. Long would its wait be. The Long Revenge The Celestial War dwindled, the Sith largely ceding control of the galaxy to the Celestials. They knew the Celestials and their kin would, eventually, make the same mistake that they did; that they would uplift a species, or an individual, and shatter a neat and tidy galaxy. The Infinite Sith withdrew far into the recesses of the galaxy, primitivism swallowing their vassals to keep their kin safe. The Columi sequestered themselves on their homeworld, and the Sharu forcibly emptied their intellects. The Dark Pantheon itself, bereft of worship and the untold billions of sapients they fed upon for sustenance, withdrew from influencing the physical realm, with the destruction of Muurshantre by an Infinity Wave annihilating the Taurannik Codex that was necessary for the immortal gods' Kissai priests, the Knell sect (namesake of the New Sith world Darkknell) of nearby Muspilli, from awakening and summoning them. The Sith continued to intermittently wage war against the Celestials over the following tens of millennia, but lacking a Sith Order to draw upon, new Infinite Sith ascending to the Dark Pantheon were rare, and with their armies and servitor races vanquished, the only war possible was a shadowy conflict fought through the subtle ebb and flow of the Force. Opportunity presented itself when the Kwa, meddling with the forbidden secrets of the Celestial-derived technology of the Infinite Gates, tore open a wound in the Force and spacetime that allowed for Abeloth to break free from imprisonment in the Maw. Abeloth fanned the flames of conflict across the galaxy, inciting war between the Gree and Kwa, corrupting the Gree to Sith worship, their sacrificing of captured Kwa on Vitae nourishing the dormant Sith deities and allowing their influence to seep into the galaxy once more. While successive escapes by Abeloth yielded little progress, perhaps due to Abeloth's goals increasingly drifting from the Dark Pantheon's as she became embedded in the Celestials' cosmic cycle, the seeds were already planted for the division and subsequent toppling of the Celestial dominion. The Celestials launched several monolith spaceships, dubbed the Tho Yor, across the galaxy, with a view to summoning them when needed to assemble a counterweight to the Sith in the eventual likelihood that they bring down the Celestial domain permanently. Even with this foreknowledge, this did not stop the Kwa, driven to desperation due to Sith-orchestrated Gree advances, from committing the mistake the Infinite Sith required to end Celestial reign; elevating the Rakata. The Second Coming The Rakata were a bipedal species of Force users with an innate aggressiveness harnessed by the Infinite Sith. Made apart of the Celestial design, the Rakata were corrupted by the Infinite Sith, worshipping the awakened Dark Pantheon as the Darths, or immortal god-emperors. And although the Rakata did not manage to seize the Infinity Gates as the Sith devised, they did create Force based hyperdrives (due to imparted Sith or stolen Celestial knowledge is unclear), and start war against the Celestials' increasingly divided vassals. With the Rakata as the Builders, the Sith's answer to the Celestials' Killiks, the Infinite Empire was reforged, greater than even its first incarnation, reclaiming control over humanity's destiny with the subjugation of Core Worlds such as Coruscant, and most significantly, the heart of Celestial power, Corellia. The Celestial War begun anew, lasting this time a staggering five thousand years. The Sith deity Darth Apollyon, formerly Zelashiel, and her consort, Hershoon, now dubbed by the Rakata Darth Trayus, pioneered Force drain on interstellar scales, and after purging the original Drall and Selonian homeworlds of life, turned their maleficent will to Arbra, and bade the native Arbrans give form to a zygote deity that might replenish the ranks of the diminished Pantheon, creating a being known only as The Darker. Bringing the wrath of the Celestials upon them for their blasphemy, the Arbrans were forced to follow the example of the Sharu, devolving into the Hoojibs to escape notice. Similarly, the anger of the Celestials was visited upon the Kwa, for their folly that had allowed Abeloth and the Infinite Sith to return, and for their elevation of the Rakata that had then allowed the newly revived Sith gods to become the Darths of the Rakata and assume lordship over the galaxy once more. The Darker was abandoned on Arbra by the Sith deities, who nonetheless continued with their efforts to elevate mortals to the Pantheon through the construction of the Trayus Academy on Malachor V. Their efforts met with some success, with the ascent of the Sith pureblood Pomojema, distinguished by his three tentacular flesh beard, ruling from Mimban. But the mastery of the techniques of pain and hunger this minor deity displayed was deemed insufficient, and so the Pantheon attempted to recreate the circumstances that gave birth to their greatest and most powerful deity - internecine conflict on Korriban. Two powerful Sith sorcerers and their followers were leveraged against one another, both strengthening the Pantheon with blood sacrifice in preparation for the Celestial War's climax, and engorging the sorcerers in question, who feasted themselves upon the essence of their enemies until they surpassed the power of even Apollyon and Trayus. The one, Darth Gorog, once known as Golg (namesake of the burial Valley), now Night Herald of the Pantheon, the other, Darth Venomis, formerly Mnggal-mnggal, the Shadow Hand of Darth Nemesis. By 30,000 BBY, the Infinite Empire numbered over five hundred worlds, the free peoples of the galaxy enslaved, only the Celestials, bereft of servitor races bar the Killiks, remaining to match the ravenous Pantheon's plans for galactic destruction, resistance of lesser races having fallen before the might of the Rakatan Star Forges. The stage was set. Upon Abeloth escaping imprisonment once more, the Celestials set their Killik armies upon Korriban, hoping to permanently cripple the Infinite Sith at last. Yet they had underestimated the cunning and raw might of the new Darth Gorog, who Joined the attacking nests. Infecting the Killiks with his mind, he wrestled control of the majority of the species from the Celestials, thus appropriating the Celestials' workforce and bolstering the Infinite Sith's mundane might to the degree that victory seemed inevitable. Making Alsakan his Throneworld, Gorog directed the Killik hivemind against the Celestials, while Venomis raised an anti-Mother in the Unknown Regions to counter Abeloth on Dathomir, whose goals were orthogonal to Nemesis' own. Fall But ultimate victory eluded the Sith. While the Infinite Empire would dominate the galaxy for a further two thousand years, the maelstrom of divine conflict that was the Celestial War would end in the ruin of both sides. The Celestials successfully rallied to separate Gorog from the Nests, emptying Alderaan and Alsakan of Killiks and driving Gorog to Sarafur (who fled thence to Shadow), the Killiks into the Unknown Regions, knowledge of the Force torn from the hivemind and the Fizz created to the purpose of preventing the Killiks from ever again being ensared by a dark sider. Yet Gree history records the means by which the Celestials were undone also. Just as Gorog's divinity was largely based off the percolation of his consciousness through the Hivemind, so did Venomis make himself a mighty deity through his creation of the ultimate vessel into which he poured his biliferous essence: a black viral infection of maxichlorians encoded in gray ooze. Together, Nemesis, the Eater of Worlds to the Gree, and Venomis, the Hollower of Beings, stormed forth, breaking Celestial power. In a final millennium of frenzied destruction, the Celestials and their dark counterparts destroyed one another, with only The Ones of Mortis and the Kathol remaining of the former. Yet the Ones were the mightiest of the Celestials, and before isolating themselves as anchorites, they brought the war to its end by dealing the finishing blow to the Dark Pantheon, vanquishing the seeming of their spirits and consigning them to an imprisonment even more total than that beyond shadows unto which they delivered Abeloth: Chaos. As to the Infinite Sith's vassals, these last of the Celestials bisected the galaxy, hoping to stem the flow of Rakata from Lehon and the infectious intentions of the one Sith deity whose will, by virtue of his alchemical cunning and the vast spread of his consciousness, still possessed some measure of influence beyond imprisonment - Darth Venomis. They furthermore riddled the Unknown Regions with hyperspatial anomalies, twisting spacetime upon itself to create Otherspace, where they imprisoned such threats as Lotek'k, Waru and the Rozzum. Escaping the calamitous defeat of the Dark Pantheon, countless Sith spirits buried themselves in the depths of fortress worlds such as Onderon, Bardotta and Krayiss II, while in their last throes, the Pantheon wove their Knell priests, their Kanzer taskmasters and the Taung Warriors of Shadow, who had been amassing near Roon as part of a pincer attack before the Celestials' pyrrhic victory, into their mortal representatives, coming to be known as the Sorcerers of Rhand. Elsewhere, lesser spirits persisted as apparitions in the darkness of space, passing into legend as the Space Wraiths and Starweird. Without the guiding will of Darth Nemesis, Rakata and Sith turned on one another, no doubt helped along by the corrupting influence of the Star Forges. The Infinite Empire splintered, with a faction led by the fearsome Soa, a Rakata of red skin and great stature by virtue of Sith alchemical modification, and a circle of Sith sorcerers known as the Infernal Council, making insidious moves upon Korriban and the mortal Adas who had proclaimed himself Darth and the new Sith'ari. They sought to offer Holocron technology to their increasingly primitive kin, yet their betrayal was anticipated, and Adas crushed the Infernal faction, taking their technology and propagating his own regime. Adas' death allowed Venomis to subtly repurpose the Korribani remnants to his purpose, and after rival Rakata dared imprison Soa and his Infinite Sith compatriots on Belsavis, thereby betraying Darth Nemesis' design, Venomis engineered the genetic reduction in ability of each subsequent generation of Rakata, allowing, within two centuries of the gambit at Korriban, for the colonisation of the galaxy by human sleeper ships, with the intent to retool humanity as the Infinite Sith's primary vassal race. This slow process took a millennium of maintenance, until matters took a surprising turn midway through the transition from Infinite Rakatan Empire to an Infinite Human Empire; the precursors of the Jedi were found. The kernel of civilisation that was left by the Celestials on Tython engaged the Rakata, and their darker halves, the Bogan, in the Force Wars, before departing for the greater galaxy. But with the decapitation of the Rakata at the battle, the inner workings of the Rakata were further torn by civil war, and Venomis accelerated his plans as a Jedi Order poised to attack a breaking Empire was an issue which could see the galaxy unified around them; an Order invading a power void made one more faction. By 25,200 BBY Venomis made his move, infecting the Rakata with his own pestilent essence and then tearing the Rakata from the Force, enabling the slave races to shatter them and sending the Rakata scurrying back to their homeworld with an empire not just long gone but entirely erased. But the Infinite Sith, through their emissary Kyrrah of Xo, had already made plans on the Tion from Xo's Eye, and, in league with Infinite Imperial remnants on Desevro, wove a Sith Order behind the throne of Xer and the Kingdom of the Cron. The secret ascension of Darth Xer thus assured, and a new hyperdrive that allowed traversing any star system developed, Darth Venomis sought to rekindle his own power and reconstitute his fellow deities from perdition, and thus bring about a swift return of the Infinite Sith. Reversals and Opportunities in the New Age Darth Xer completed a kingdom which allowed his son, Xim, to complete an Empire, and rule openly as Daritha, even connecting this remnant regime to the old, with the conquest of Korriban and Thule. Such was the coordination of the Infinite Sith ploy that they had almost continuous growth between the sundering of the Rakata and the rise of Xer and Xim. Even as the Jedi Order co-opted the efforts of the Infinite Sith in colonising the Core with humanity, the Infinite Sith were more than prepared and their empire burgeoned. Burgeoned, that is, until they encountered another species which had benefited from the decline of the Rakata; the Hutts. And for all the power that Xim and his legions held, it was material power, and as such it could be surpassed. Within a handful of hard-fought engagements the Hutts defeated Xim's legions and captured the Daritha, evolution having allowed the Hutts to be resistant to the Sith Force-based intrigues and as such the limited amount of adepts available allowed for the Hutts to undo the Xim Empire, retreating to the Tion Cluster, effectively being sealed within the Cluster by the creation of Jedi fortresses between them and the Republic. Darth Venomis allowed the Kingdom to fragment instead of force a solution that may have required a more direct effort. Instead he reasoned that indirect and shadowed rule was worth more than a title. And so, taking the legacy of Darth Gorog, he sought the Infinite Sith remnants of Alsakan nobility, while manipulating the planet of Kashi Mer, with its Force strong heritable, to give birth to a Force user that would be powerful enough and malleable enough to destroy the Jedi Order from within. Destroying Kashi Mer with the sorcery of supernova induction was a calculated move, and the Celestial anchorites noticed and arranged a meeting with the man selected, after five centuries of painstaking manipulation, to be the instrument of Sith vengeance; Xendor. By dint of luck, or perhaps interference by the Son, Xendor made it through the encounter and began to speak out against the efforts of the Jedi to create a set doctrine over the Force. By connecting the nature of separate traditions to resist change, and allying with those who had been left without by the Unification Wars, Xendor created the Legions of Lettow. An opening strike to end the war before it could begin with a strike on Ossus saw the Legions repulsed, and battles across the Core slowly turned against Xendor until his death at the Battle of Columus. His Legions retreat to Lettow in tatters, before being finished off; the first effort by the Infinite Sith against the Jedi has ended in miserable failure. Nonetheless Venomis waited patiently, allowing Alaskan's influence to travel into the northern dependencies, allowing for a growth in numbers by proxy. Similarly, the Tionese lineage, now a mere shadow of Sith teachings loosely unified in Darth worship, were allowed to continue as necessary until the Republic met up with Tion. On their arrival, Venomis encouraged the envy and greed of the Tion, unifying them as the rulers of Desevro. The invasion began in 24,000 BBY, a century long invasion of the Core which began well for their fleets. However, the tide turned against them and slowly the Republic and Jedi pushed the Tionese back. More concerning was that the Republic ascertained the source of the Tionese coalitions on devastated Desevro, breaking the Union and, save for Desevro, subjugating the entire Cluster. The Infinite Sith were at the weakest they had been since their first excursions from Korriban a hundred thousand years prior. Nonetheless, Venomis still had Alsakan, and so sought to sink mercantile claws into its purse worlds to shore up Sith material strength, and concentrated his efforts on cementing shadowed influence over Alsakan's territories. He did, however, turn to push the Hutts to civil war, determined to remove them as a factor in the future. The Alsakan Conflicts By focusing efforts on shadowed influence over Alsakan and its territories, control over a third of the Republic was secured. But Venomis had spent millennia devising means by which he might revive the Pantheon and nurse the immortal gods, his own enfeebled essence included, to full power, and in moving against the Jedi Order once more through his infestation of distant Pamorjal in 20,000 BBY, he reasoned that the same process by which the Darths had attained divinity - the consumption of life energy - might restore the Pantheon, or at least reknit the seeming of their shattered spirits to allow communion. Imbuing his corruption into the Forcesaber-derived weapon of one of his many possessed avatars, a former Jedi, his creation, the Soulsaber, was intended as an artifact of ritual sacrifice, tainting and siphoning the essence of the countless Jedi Masters sent to root out Venomis' presence on Pamorjal. While the Jedi defeated Venomis' avatar, the foe they were facing being animated by a mere tendril of Venomis' psychically starved and partially immured essence, he now held the key to the cage, and even the Jedi who raised the Temples of Vormijj to seal away the Soulsaber had been infected with his will. Driven insane, Jedi Master Humat was directed to retrieve the soul stealer, the milky-white talisman infused with Venomis' being that had given power to the Soulsaber. Creating the Cell of Imu on Coruscant, through Humat's eyes did Venomis watch the movements of his enemies, and through his hands Venomis fashioned eldritch devices by which he might reestablish communication with Darth Nemesis. In 17018 BBY, after two millennia of careful vigil, further experimentation and the conclusions he drew from such, Venomis incited war between Alsakan and Coruscant, ostensibly the former seeking to replace the latter as capital of the Republic, but driven by the actual intent to bathe the galaxy in death and dark energy, a route to resurrecting the immortal gods while seamlessly re-establishing mundane Sith rule over the galaxy. Corellia sought to be neutral, halving the remaining Republic strength, but it was impossible to reach the point whereby the Alsakan could outright overwhelm the Republic and a three hundred and eighteen year long war ended in stalemate. Such was that stalemate was that Alsakan could rejoin the Republic and continue the process of accumulating strength. So although the Infinite Sith did not have their great and unparalleled empire, they had forged a regime which could stand toe-to-toe with the much weakened philosophical descendants of the Celestials, as long as the Jedi did not intervene, and they had demonstrated that they could influence the Republic without the Jedi realising, making use of the extremely limited resources they had to hand. And so, settling into the routine that they had pursued against the Celestials, albeit over a much smaller timeframe, the Infinite Sith on Alsakan made war against Coruscant again, lasting this time eight hundred years from 16,200 BBY. The drawn out centuries of bloodshed fed the ruinous powers behind the Alsakan Sith, and the Pantheon's Shadow Hand too grew stronger, turning, in convincement that the Hutts were sufficiently weakened, to annihilate the Hutts, destroying the Varl system in 15,000 BBY by the same sorcery he had used to destroy the Kashi sun. However, this did not destroy the Hutts, who impossibly survived the carnage and fled their now lonely world to begin the long re-establishment of Hutt Space in name, and also in the shadows. That the Hutts abandoned their militant ways only served the purposes of the Sith, because they could be relied upon to undermine the Republic rather than seek to compete for it. A shadow war between the Hutts and the Sith was really nothing more than amusement for them, who had waged such a war for sixty five millennia. The Pius Dea Era The Alsakan Conflicts, as they become known, continued on, with the Third (14,500 to 14,300 BBY), Fourth (13,800 to 13,200 BBY) and Fifth (13,050 to 12,700 BBY) ending in draws, no doubt in accordance to plan. However, by this point the Sith had found another way to co-opt the Republic. By allowing the grime of Hutt influence to percolate, they were able to radicalise a section of the Republic's population against all manner of decadence and whip them into an Abeloth-centric religious frenzy with only the slightest Force nudging. Infecting and possessing the cultist Contispex (and his descendants, and ultimately other Forceful successors), Darth Venomis did just that, with the Pius Dea religion becoming political by 12,000 BBY and seizing control of the Republic by impeaching the Chief of State. With control of the Republic at long last, Venomis undid the constitutional limits on his rule to justify invading Hutt Space, having driven their shadowy influence from the Republic and now seeking total control. With everything being done unpalatably legally the Jedi couldonly stand by and watch, to the pleasure of the now burgeoning Dark Pantheon. In 11,933, after sixty years and three Crusades, the Jedi Order stepped away from the Republic in the Recusal, tremendously strengthening the Sith's hand, and those remaining loyalist Jedi were reworked as the first Sith born from the ranks of the Jedi, the Order of the Terrible Glare. Yet argument over the division of the spoils, and on how best to retain advantage, resurrected rifts between the legacy of Gorog and the followers of Venomis, whose ostensible efforts to revive his fellow Darths through the perpetuation of bloodshed seemed increasingly a cloak obfuscating an attempt to empower only his own divinity. The Crusades spread focus north, eating into the possibilities of the Alsakan Sith nobles of expanding their influence and, being viewed as a deliberate effort to weaken their hand, resulted in Alsakan looking to allies outside Venomis' puppet Republic - the hated Hutts, the Herglics, Duros and Bothans - barely more than a century after seeming ultimate victory. Though the secession was successfully completed, protecting the north from the Pius Dea, Alsakan was only able to hold firm, and not successfully strike back, resulting in centuries of bickering while Pius Dea grew stronger and stronger still, expanding the Republic at the expense of the Bothans, Hutts and Herglics, before turning inward upon their own nonhuman species. With the Pius Dea poised to become unstoppable, events finally came to a head when the Alsakan Sith considered the impossible, in striking parallel with the Naddists' gambit millennia later: an alliance with the Jedi. The Seventh Alsakan Conflict saw the Pius Dea faith sundered and the Jedi placed in command of the new Republic, Venomis withdrawing his effulgent decotion from his vessel Contispex XIX. The Jedi-turned-Sith of the Terrible Glare were altogether vanquished, High Shaman Rur alone surviving, preserved by Sith alchemy, on Garn, surrounded by the Rakatan-derived soul snare technology Venomis had introduced, and the lesser Rozzum abominations he had successfully liberated from Otherspace, evidence of the perilous nearness the Shadow Hand's efforts had come to breaking the Celestial wrought prisons entirely. Venomis was not entirely defeated, however. Time and the nourishment provided by the Alsakan Conflicts and Pius Dea Crusades had allowed the apocalyptic deities to coalesce into true cognizance once more, yet they remained, with the greater portion of Venomis' spirit, imprisoned in Chaos through the Celestials' many seals, and so now Venomis' will, having relinquished Contispex, seized upon another hapless vessel and moved against the lesser descendants of the Celestials on Kathol. Enslaving them and tearing from them secrets of the Celestials' own Codex, he fathomed out the Kathol seal, undoing the Celestials' work with the destruction of a Kathol launch gate. Tearing open a gaping wound in spacetime and the Force, the Kathol Rift was thereby created and the Charr Ontee flipped into Otherspace, a small price to pay for the breaking of one seal to the cage. While Venomis' vessel, the Jedi Halbret, was able to do the unthinkable and break free of his influence in the confusion of the cataclysm to summon a contingent of Jedi Knights to drive the dark deity from Kathol, the damage had been done. Venomis was stronger than ever, but more importantly, the entirety of the reified Pantheon was able to, in small but direct ways, influence the physical realm once more. Instigation and New Allies Directed by the Pantheon, the Sith turned to conquest and expansion, spreading from the Nihil Retreat and their scattered outpost worlds. Towards the end of the Rianitus Period, the Gen'dai homeworld fell before the Sith's armies, and the Forceful Gen'dai Xen Gaal incepted into the ranks of the Sith training on Malachor V, gaining the favour of Venomis and rising swiftly to become Harbinger and Sith Battlelord, Darth Cruor. While the Sith descended lineages of Desevro and Alsakan were steadily whittled away by cultural contamination and the efforts of the Jedi, an ideological thread woven through the Infinite Sith's primitive kin on Korriban retained its potency. Founded by Wyyrmuk the Undying, this Darth cult would prove instrumental to the Infinite Sith's plans, not only through strengthening the deities through blood sacrifice on the Mongrel Altar, but through the conversion of Jedi to Sith adherence. When a Jedi exploration team came upon Malachor V, from which they were directed by Cruor to pierce the Stygian Caldera and reach Korriban, priceless opportunity arose when expedition leader Ku'ar Danar tarried awhile to study Sith sorcery under the cult's high priest Dathka Graush. Coming upon the Pantheon's Great Temple in the Valley of the Sleeping Kings, Danar was inexorably drawn to the dark side, and upon communion with the immortal gods was christened Darth Dreadwar. While Dreadwar aided Graush in his bid to become King of Korriban, in true Sith tradition he arranged for the assassination of his master in order to obtain Graush's recondite secrets of immortality. Fleeing the wrath of Dathka's heir Hakagram, Dreadwar returned to Cruor's side on Malachor to enact a darker and grander purpose. Seeking to stealthily corrupt and repurpose the entire Jedi Order as a dark side hammer by which they could shatter the spine of the galaxy, the Pantheon directed Dreadwar and Cruor to instigate schism. While the former's once-Jedi Padawan, Ajunta Pall, and dozens more beside, were tempted to the dark side, their efforts to spread their newfound teachings to the Council failed, and the Heresiarch Jedi were banished, their quest for vengeance beginning the Hundred-Year Darkness. Neither Dreadwar nor Cruor played a direct role in the conflict, with Cruor instead raising Veeshas Tuwan on Arkania, and Dreadwar similarly furthering Infinite Sith presence through his subjugation of the Nilrebmah system. But Dreadwar's efforts represented more than just satiation of personal ambition, but rather, alongside the workings of the Sith sorceress Vahl on Ambria, an attempt by the Pantheon to elevate two of their servants to godhood in an effort to ensure there would be at least two Sith deities in the physical plane. Conceived in haste born of opportunity, the attempts met varying success, with Vahl's ritual cleansing Ambria of life, but resulting in her own destruction as well. Dreadwar attempted to replicate the success of Yuuzhan'tar, seeking to move Nilrebmah XIII from its orbit and tether his essence to it upon consuming its population, and while the process completed, empowering his spirit to terrible and deific heights, his body was annihilated and his spirit trapped inside the monolith he had raised to accomplish his ritual. After a century, the war between Heresiarch and Jedi wound to a close. The Heresiarchs may have yet triumphed if it were not for the interference of the Alsakan nobility, who, fearing the total loss of the Pantheon's favour and their own continuing decline into obsolescence, sought to supplant the Heresiarchs, joining the final battle on Corbos. Their folly merely weakened the dark forces, and resulted in the destruction of the Sith lineage on Alsakan and hastened Heresiarch defeat on Corbos, although inherited discontent meant the Alsakan Conflicts would persist until 3017 BBY. Upon their exile from known space, the Heresiarchs found Korriban and lorded themselves over the Sith people they found there, and in the ensuing disagreements and power struggles between competing Dark Lords did the Infinite Sith place their contender into play, the Exile who had inherited and appropriated the Cult of Darth and made himself into Darth Andeddu, first of the new Shadow Council. Andeddu reigned on mortuary Korriban, but the return of Tulak Hord, the fearsome conqueror who had departed the Stygian Caldera with Remulus Dreypa, Sorzus Syn, Karness Muur and lesser Heresiarchs turned Sith Lords to battle the Jedi again, forced him to flee to his homeworld of Prakith. With Hord's own death at the hands of his apprentice, the power struggle ended with sole Lordship falling to Orton Cela, who inherited the hundred worlds his master had conquered and thus a new Sith Empire. This domain was altogether separate from the Infinite Sith's holdings in the Unknown Regions, yet the Pantheon's shadowy design did hold sway through the Shadow Council, that body of alchemically preserved Dark Lords who slept in stone in the Great Temple, to which were inducted those Sith spirits who passed through death yet triumphed over it. From then on, it would be the Shadow Council rather than the scant few living emissaries of previous eras that directly commanded the allegiance of the Infinite Sith remnant buried in the Unknown Regions, acting as interlocutors for the will of the Pantheon. Discord The glory of the Sith ensured, little interference by the Shadow Council was deemed necessary until after Jen'jidai-Kissai hybrids, led by Marka Ragnos, Naga Sadow and Simus, overthrew the rule of pure Dark Jedi blood over a century preceding the Great Hyperspace War. It was in this time that Venomis' blight made incursions into the Caldera to fall upon Medriaas in apparent response to the civil war, vitiating a Forceful foetus who would become the demonic child Tenebrae, who possessed the telltale black sclera characteristic of Venomis' fully empowered avatars. Assuming the appropriate name and identity of Vitiate, the putrid abomination opened discord in the Pantheon, with Dreadwar opposing the elder god's efforts to push beyond his station as Shadow Hand, raising Naga Sadow as a Darth to oppose Venomis' malignance. Yet knowledge of the Jedi and Republic gleaned from his communion with Dreadwar's spirit trapped on Nilrebmah only served to drive Sadow's personal ambition, and Sadow broke from the tutelage of Simus and Dreadwar to chase his own designs, beginning the Great Hyperspace War that would bring the Jedi and Republic down upon the Old Sith Empire. The aftermath of the Great Hyperspace War saw the Shadow Council raising the spirit of Marka Ragnos to record an amulet message to ensure the Sith's survival according to their purpose, while Vitiate seized upon the opportunity presented and ensured his avatar body would survive the swift maceration typical of possession by the Rot God at the expense of the bulk of the Sith Empire's surviving Sith Lords in his Nathemic Ritual. Discarding the temporary identity of Vitiate, Venomis declared himself Sith'ari to unify the splintering Sith Empire, and reformed the Sith under his will on Dromund Kaas. It is unknown to what degree Venomis' labours truly represented the will of the Pantheon as a collective, if the idiot forces of destruction that constituted it even possessed much in the way of collective will. By now one of the oldest of the deities and more innately powerful than any bar Nemesis - and possessing presence in the physical world even the Left-Handed God lacked - it can be interpreted that Venomis' plan to consume the galaxy represented a rapacious attempt to attain singular power, or, that it satisfied the blindly ravenous desires of his fellow gods. Either way, it is known that certain of those spirits who had joined (or had merely once aligned with) the Shadow Council vehemently opposed the Sith Emperor, convening on Yavin IV. The Old Sith Wars While the reformed Sith Empire spread from Dromund Kaas around the edge of the galacy to link up with the Nihil Retreat and Csilla in the Unknown Regions, Infinite Sith design continued elsewhere, and two seals to the Pantheon's prison were broken, the first, the temples of Tascollan, being successfully moved out of alignment through activation of ancient artifacts by the hand of Valik Kodank, who sought to surpass even Dreadwar's power and chain her essence to feed on the Nebula's only sun. The second and greater seal, that of the Cosmic Turbine, was destroyed in the Vultar Cataclysm in 4,250 BBY, after the Sith instigated the Third Great Schism. By 4,000 BBY, new manners of Sith devotee were cropping up en masse thanks to the engineering of the Shadow Council, with conflicts on Muzara and Athiss as Sithspawn guardians and wraith servants, respectively, battled the Jedi desperately attempting to combat the Sith resurgence. Of these devotees, the Naddists, the Krath and the Mecrosa were the most powerful and organised sects. The first were named in honour of Freedon Nadd, the fallen Jedi turned Dark Lord who learnt the Sith ways from Darths Naga Sadow and Venomis, killing the former yet fleeing before the might of the latter to Onderon; the Krath, while one step further removed from Infinite Sith influence, were in fact named after one of the apocalyptic deities that had passed into the mythology of Empress Teta; lastly, the Mecrosa Order was formed by Mireya, acolyte of the Infinite Sith Darth Vitus of Oricon, who let percolate the Infinite Sith teachings among the Tapani, even granting Sith Lords holdings on Nyssa. The Shadow Council, and the spirit of Freedon Nadd who served them, engineered the rise of a dark messiah to unify these disparate sects through the corruption of Exar Kun. Yet defeat in the Great Sith War saw the Sith fractured into separate ideological lineages once again, obscuring which efforts represented the design of the Infinite Sith. The confusion is evident in these given examples: the mental enslavement of Mandalore the Ultimate by Vitiate, a move that was yet nullified by the replacement of Mandalore with an agent of Kun's Brotherhood on Korriban, and the positioning of the Rhandite Darth Nihilus within a Triumvirate that descended from an Empire Revan created in opposition to Vitiate (despite the fact it was to Vitiate's service that Revan was initially corrupted, a yoke from which Revan presumably broke free). What is known is that, in spite of near success in bringing darkness upon the galaxy, Venomis in the guise of Sith Emperor would be defeated in the Galactic War, his depraved being retreating to plague the worlds of the Unknown Regions, and the efforts of Revan and the Jedi Exile (both with the sealing of the wound in the Force inhering to Malachor and its avatar Darth Nihilus during the Dark Wars, and their battling as spirits against Vitiate in the Galactic War) not only ensured the Pantheon remained imprisoned but that the bulk of the Infinite Sith's mundane might, gathering in the Unknown Regions, was sealed in carbonite. The Shadow Council was unable to prevent the fracturing of Vitiate's Empire, and neither the Cult of Darth Phobos nor the crusades of Darth Desolous saved it from collapse, only scattered clans remaining to be unified by Darth Ruin millennia later. The Infinite Sith, now distinguished as the "True Sith" by Darth Traya from their brethren that pursued the philosophies of self-aggrandisement over service to destruction, were wholly defeated, and if not for the workings of the Shadow Council would have been in weaker position than even the days following their defeat by the Celestials. Dreadwar, having foreseen this defeat, manipulated one of Kun's Brotherhood to liberate his spirit from the Nilrebmah monolith during the Great Sith War, and with the vast energy released that resulted in the destruction of Nilrebmah XII and XIII, followed a group of adventurers that had been decoupled from time into the far future to when he perceived the Pantheon would return. Thus, Darth Cruor alone remained as emissary of the true Sith. Return The Shadow Council played no part in the New Sith Wars beyond the amalgamation of Xendor's spirit, called from beyond, and Battlelord Cruor, in the form and guise of the Dark Underlord. The Shadow Council would be joined by the spirit of Darth Rivan, who survived in his holocron on Almas, but their power, linked to the Pantheon that had been so laid low, fled from Korriban, and the Infinite Sith would remain dormant until 41 BBY. In that year, Darth Plagueis and Darth Sidious, in an unprecedented feat of mastery, fought for control of the Force itself in an etheric battle that resulted in them tipping the balance of the Force itself to darkness. This empyrean act would have many ramifications unforeseen by the two Lords of the Banite line, including the alleged immaculate conception of Anakin Skywalker, the tremendous weakening of the Jedi's connection to the Force, and the release of a wave of dark side energy that tore through the barriers containing the immortal gods' influence. While not liberated from their imprisonment, for only the breaking of all the remaining Celestial seals would truly revive them from the netherworld in which they dwelled, they were now able to pour but a fraction of their essence into vessels to embody themselves in the physical realm, and thus gained an ability to influence the galaxy greater than the small influence they had possessed before Revan had stemmed it. The Knell of Muspilli, fulfilling their purpose, invoked the apocalyptic deities' power in the Nihil Retreat where bodies were furnished by Lorekeeper Blessed Toxmalb, and straightaway did the ruinous powers set to work, restoring communion with their renourished Shadow Council and undoing the gravitational disturbances in the Perann Nebula confining their mortal representatives, allowing Cronal into the greater galaxy. Darth Sidious, now Galactic Emperor Palpatine, heard whispers of a malice growing in the Unknown Regions and dispatched Grand Admiral Thrawn to investigate. Yet the creation of the Empire of the Hand could only act as a buffer against the mortal True Sith, and little could defend against the resurrection of the Shadow Council, with the rising of Adas on Nicht Ka and Karness Muur on an unknown desert moon in 19 BBY, Darth Rivan on Almas in 17 BBY, XoXaan and Dathka Graush on Korriban in 1 BBY, Valik Kodank on the asteroids of Tascollan in 3 ABY, Exar Kun on Yavin IV in 11 ABY, Marka Ragnos on Korriban in 14 ABY, Darth Gorog on Shadow in 41 ABY and lastly Darth Andeddu on Prakith in 137 ABY. While all but Adas, XoXaan and Graush were defeated after their return by Jedi or Sith rivals, there was yet still a greater Sith who the Infinite Sith returned to life - Palpatine. Palpatine had sought advice from the Shadow Council on numerous occasions from 19 BBY to his last piligrimage in his original body in 4 ABY, and after the death of one of his clone bodies at the Battle of Pinnacle Base in 10 ABY, the Shadow Council guided Palpatine to a new clone body on Byss, hence Palpatine's spirit surviving the otherwise baneful energies of his own Force Storm. It was in this body that Palpatine approached the Council once again in 11 ABY, and they once again freely dispensed advice. Yet it is oft debated by Sith historians whether such was representative of the Infinite Sith genuinely backing the increasingly deiform Palpatine's plans for the galaxy, or whether the fact that the Shadow Council restored Palpatine to an inferior clone, and advised he seek to possess the infant Anakin Solo in a bid that finally destroyed him, are more indicative of attempts to sabotage a rival. The True Sith's plans escalated following the Batlle of Endor, seeking to seize the opportunity provided by the weakened and fractured galaxy. Their armies freed from carbonite by the Nightsister Silri and bolstered by the Shadow stormtroopers of Cronal and Super Star Destroyers stolen from Byss, a substantial military was rapidly forming under the command of Darth Dreadwar, who reappeared in the timestream precisely for such purpose. Nilrebmah having been destroyed, Dreadwar consumed the life of and tethered his spirit to the planet Indix, and having attached planetary hyperdrives that enabled him to move his magnificence freely, settled in the Mobus system. The Infinite Sith Empire was taking shape again as a cohesive regime deep in the Unknown Regions, Dreadwar gathering all evil and uniting the bulk of the Rhandite remnant with the Rakatan Archipelago through the efforts of Raspir, the court magician of Adas who had been recently freed by the Rakatan Elder Ruthic on Tulpaa. Yet the Pantheon refused to act in haste, knowing that the True Sith were still vulnerable if they were to be detected by the Empire of the Hand or Remsi Republic, and so were forced to act in terrible sloth, only attacking the galaxy through proxies. But this was a game the Pantheon were accustomed to playing, and it brought great pleasure to the profane deities to watch once more as their vassals and unwitting servants ravaged the galaxy, inciting the Ssi Ruuvi to storm forth, and seeking to cripple the New Republic through Cronal's campaigns. Yet equally important was the restoration of a Sith Order in the greater galaxy, and the Infinite Sith, seeing the shatterpoints in the galaxy's future, sought to accomplish this efficaciously through the corruption of but a handful of individuals, and so XoXaan of the Shadow Council tempted A'Sharad Hett to Sith study, and then did the spirit of Marka Ragnos tutor the one who would become Darth Vassago. Cruor, adopting the name Darth Dispicable, joined Vassago, and gathering all manner of Dark Jedi and adepts once in service to the Galactic Empire to them on Korriban, created the New Sith Order. The Yuuzhan Vong The New Sith Order was intended as a vassal, a thread of Sith power that the Pantheon intended to weave within a greater Empire; not the Galactic Empire, that the Infinite Sith had turned from as a potential source of mundane power upon the failure of Cronal at Mindor, but rather the Yuuzhan Vong Empire. Millennia before, Yuuzhan'tar had bade his Yuuzhan Vong children multiply, and spread forth as a scourge paralleling that first expansion from Korriban, to smash the Abominor, who had outlived their purpose, and the Silentium with which they warred. Driving the automatons from the Yuuzhan Vong galaxy to return to the galaxy they had left, the Yuuzhan Vong seized their galaxy, only to war upon themselves, with Yuuzhan'tar reaching the critical mass, feeding from the death, to bifurcate his godlike consciousness into a second planet-sized avatar. However, he lost control of the Yuuzhan Vong at the critical moment, having put into place the last element to make the Yuuzhan Vong truly a terrifying threat to the Celestials; the ability to be immune to the Force. Yuuzhan'tar sought to make its thralls a lesser threat but they, rendered immune by his own hand to the deific Force powers he could have otherwise deployed against them, destroyed him. His second avatar, not fully formed, was scarred by the blow, and fled the galaxy in circa 15,000 BBY as Zonama Sekot. After wandering the Intergalactic Void, Sekot despaired to find, as he neared return to the home galaxy, the Celestial barrier erected around the galaxy to prevent exactly such. The god was cursed to wait at the galaxy's edge for seeming eternity, gnawing in impotent rage at the hyperspace disturbance that barred him, until circa 200 BBY when Darth Venomis, newly empowered by a wound torn in the Force by Darths Ramage and Tenebrous - a wound that would be opened further to allow the reawakening of the rest of the Pantheon by Tenebrous' successors - to a semblance of his previous might, joined his strength with that of Sekot to tear a hole in the barrier at Vector Prime. The entire Pantheon then brought their powers to bear against the disturbance after 41 BBY, weakening it further and thereby allowing the Yuuzhan Vong, who had followed Sekot in leaving the galaxy they had ruined in the Cremlevian Wars for pastures new, to make initial incursions, reaching Sekot in 32 BBY. It was Sekot who won Vergere, Jedi Master and failed apprentice of Palpatine, over to Sith allegiance, and through Vergere would the Infinite Sith complete Hett's corruption started by XoXaan, and then through him, and the corruption of Jacen Solo, thus sewed two separate Sith Orders for purposes of harrying the Jedi in preparation for their coming. The Yuuzhan Vong War, then, must be understood to be another proxy war engineered by the True Sith. However, the New Sith Order fell to infighting that left Cruor a spectre tied to his Hendanyn death mask on Korriban, and Darth Vassago fell from power also, thus falling outside of Infinite Sith control before they could be planted within the Yuuzhan Vong Empire. However, the Yuuzhan Vong War saw the rise of the mysterious Darth Yammka, known to the Yuuzhan Vong as their Slayer god Yun-Yammka, who had, through mastering the power of time and consuming other timelines, become a terrible and great being surpassing even the might of Dreadwar, with subjective millennia to accrue mastery of the Force. Gathering the Yuuzhan Vong to him, and with the promotion of Yuuzhan Vong to the Force and subsequent Sith allegiance such as the Shamed One Onimi, the Slayer Darth Vua and the female Shaper known only as 'Vongerella,' the Infinite Sith steadily reintegrated the children of Yuuzhan'tar into the fold, and while the Yuuzhan Vong War ended in failure, the galaxy was greatly weakened by both it, and the Swarm Wars and Second Galactic Civil War that soon followed. The Shadow War While the Shadow Council's gambit with A'Sharad Hett bore fruit in the form of the One Sith, Darth Krayt, like the being Abeloth who nearly brought apocalypse to the galaxy in 44 ABY, was not or was no longer beholden to the Pantheon. Yet his seven years of rule over the galaxy had macerated it further, and after his defeat in 138 ABY, the Pantheon perceived that their time had come, and the time of orchestrating proxy wars was over. Yet their efforts to create vassals and engineer such conflicts had left a great many disparate elements that must be unified or annihilated before attempt on the galaxy was made in full, and to this end Dreadwar, accompanied by avatars possessed by Nemesis and Venomis, lured the Acolytes of Darkness to Mobus in 145 ABY, hoping to end the Shadow War between disparate Sith and Jedi groups in the Unknown Regions. By the cunning of Darth Insipid, however, Dreadwar was ensnared by a Rakatan mind trap disguised as Darth Gorog's holocron, which Insipid had retrieved from Shadow in 40 ABY, and the avatars of Nemesis and Venomis, mere creations of the Force reliant on Dreadwar's power siphoned from Mobus, floundered. The engagement in the Mobus system ended with the Acolytes withdrawing, but not destroyed as the Pantheon had desired, and after they joined with the Dominion of Darkness, they reforged the New Sith Order, and so the organisation the Infinite Sith had wrought in an effort to strengthen their hand over a century prior became, alongside the Galactic Triumvirate, a new enemy. Yet Yammka and Cruor, newly risen from Korriban, remained, and beneath them a vast True Sith Empire which had spent decades conquering not only the rest of the Unknown Regions, but the unclaimed territories of the satellite galaxies. The surviving Star Forges having created a vast armada, it was now time to lay siege to the galaxy again, break the final seals that held fast the prison of the immortal gods of the Sith, and revive the apocalyptic deities, uncontested by the last of the Celestials who had since perished on Mortis, to consume the galaxy at last. In 165 ABY, all having been made ready for their return, the last of the Star Wars was begun. Cartography Worlds of the Infinite Sith Empire circa 100,000 BBY Alpheridies Belsavis Criton's Point Hoth Onderon Janguine Doan Korriban and the worlds that will form the Stygian Caldera Muzara Syngia Tascollan Millinar Yavin IV Xo Vjun Worlds Acquired by circa 28,000 BBY Arkania Tund Arbra Malachor Krayiss II Worlds Acquired after the Fall of the Second Infinite Empire Byss (from 25,200 BBY) Pamorjal (20,000 BBY) Ambria (7,200 BBY) Nilrebmah (7003 BBY) Naos (6,900 BBY) Individuals The Dark Pantheon known also as the Immortal Gods of the Sith, Those Who Dwell Beyond the Veil, the Apocalyptic Deities, the Ruinous Powers Darth Nemesis (Typhojem, the Left-Handed Gog, the Eater of Worlds, the Faceless Mouths, Lord of Darkness) Darth Venomis (Mnggal-mnggal, Chancellors Contispex I-XIX, Sith Emperor Vitiate, the Shadow Hand, the Gray Swallowing, the Soulworm, the Hollower of Beings, Lord of Affliction) Darth Trayus (Hershoon, The Destroyer, Lord of Betrayal) Darth Apollyon (Zelashiel, The Blasphemer) Darth Gorog (Golg, the Night Herald) Abeloth (The Mother, The Lady with the Locust Heart, the Vain Goddess) Yuuzhan'tar (Zonama Sekot) Bilious Torment Sakkra-Kla Malmourral Kad Ha'rangir Hod Ha'ran Aram Acheron Ivax Kiax Krath Pomojema